On culture, you end up near Deirdre McCloskey's position in her Bourgeois trilogy, which roots industrialization (and the exponential takeoff of economic growth) in shifting cultural attitudes towards commerce in early modern Western Europe.
Yes, definitely an inspiration. I think my perspective is similarly also built from a sort of process of elimination where cultural attitudes emerge as a primary explanation because all of the other ones seem insufficient.
Very interesting! Here's yet another theory for you. The British were at the forefront of another revolution: Banking. Insurance. CREDIT and that was necessary to turn a few inventions, no matter how useful, into a revolution if you can't pay for it. Sure, Rome was rich but it wasn't good at spreading the money (and credit) around.
Maybe they did invent a printing press or a cotton gin or a hundred other things that disappeared without a trace because the inventors were never able to cash in on them.
Interesting stuff. My understanding is that ancient Rome didn't have too much in the way of intellectual property laws, at least by our standards, which could also play a big role here. Combined with suspicion of novelty, disdain for manual work, and slave labor, and you've got a lot of incentives not to invent new things.
I think you have to reframe the question China and Rome were producing complex machines and larges masses of products for centuries, but that isnt exactly what is meant by the industrial revolution.
what we really mean is why they didnt find themselves on a exponential technological track like those living during the industrial revolution did.
and to that I think the answer is that they didnt have the same kind of competitive market process as existed in those later societies. The rush to invest in tech companies is not a totally new phenomenon one could look at the over investment in early rail roads in Britain and see the same thing. The fusion of greed and technological innovation is I think the secret sauce behind the trend of constant improvement.
To muddy the waters somewhat, well before Rome fell, the Chinese had invented:
The Seismoscope (132 AD): The first known seismoscope, the "Houfeng Didong Yi," was invented by Chinese astronomer Zhang Heng. It could detect earthquakes from hundreds of miles away, proving that the Earth does indeed move under your feet.
Suspension Bridge (282 AD): The Chinese built the world's first suspension bridge, the Anji Bridge, which spanned the Jin River in Sichuan province. It was a real "bridge over troubled water," standing strong for over 1,000 years.
Iron Smelting (4th century BC): The Chinese were the first to smelt iron, a process that revolutionized agriculture and warfare. They were also the first to cast iron into tools, making farming and fighting a lot easier.
Crossbow (4th century BC): The Chinese invented the crossbow, a weapon that could shoot arrows with deadly accuracy. It was the "point and shoot" of its time, giving warriors a new way to say "hello" from a distance.
Wheelbarrow (1st century BC): The Chinese invented the wheelbarrow, which made transporting goods a breeze. It was a real "game-changer," allowing people to move heavy loads with minimal effort.
Paper (105 AD): The Chinese invented paper, which replaced bamboo, silk, and other materials as the primary writing surface. It was a "paper revolution," making communication and record-keeping more efficient.
Gunpowder (9th century AD): The Chinese invented gunpowder, which was initially used for fireworks and later for warfare. It was a "blast" from the past, changing the face of conflict forever.
Compass (2nd century BC): The Chinese invented the compass, which used a magnetic needle to point north. It was a "magnetic" invention, helping sailors navigate the seas and explorers find their way.
Porcelain (2nd century BC): The Chinese invented porcelain, a type of ceramic that's fired at high temperatures to create a hard, translucent material. It was a "china" revolution, making tableware and decorative items more durable and beautiful.
Seismometer (132 AD): Zhang Heng also invented the first seismometer, which could detect earthquakes and record their intensity. It was a "groundbreaking" invention, helping people understand and predict seismic activity.
You missed the most important one, the mouldboard plow. When this arrived in England it changed ploughing from requiring a team of six or eight horses to needing one or two, while being faster. As a result the land requirement for growing horse fodder plummeted from about half of the total under cultivation to less than a tenth.
That freed up a lot of horses for other uses, powering mills of various kinds. As well as forcing a lot of ex farm labourers into the towns. Reducing the number of horses meant land formerly used to grow their fodder could be used to grow food crops, too.
The seed drill, also invented by the Han, both reduced the seed grain requirement from about two bushels per acre to about half a bushel and dramatically increased yields by preventing plant overcrowding, so net yields of wheat tripled in the best cases.
According to Robert Temple in his book, “The Genius of China,” a history of Chinese science and technology published in 1998, the Chinese invented the moldboard plow before the third century B.C.
Made of cast iron, the plowshare was shaped like a V, with the blade carving into the ground and the two arms arching away like gull wings. Because the arms were curved, they turned the earth away from the blade, which both reduced friction and more effectively plowed the soil. The “moldboard” is the curved plowshare; the name comes from “mold,” the Old German word for “soil”.
I think an unaddressed point (related to your points regarding the lack of printing press) is the underlying genetic human capital of the people of the Roman Empire. As Garrett Jones demonstrated in his book *Hive Mind*, small changes in a population's average IQ has big effects.
A recent paper looks into this--discussed here: https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2024/03/what-do-ancient-genomes-show-about-recent-human-evolution/. The abstract states in part, "The study supports a mild hypothesis of Gregory Clark’s model, showing a noticeable rise in genetic propensities for intelligence, academic achievement and professional status across Europe from the Middle Ages to the present." Given the selection for intelligence, etc., since the time of the Roman Empire, maybe the Roman Empire simply had too low of an average IQ to kickstart the industrial revolution.
The Romans had much worse overall technology than 18th century England, and the rate of innovation was much, much lower, and the rate per capita was much, much, much lower.
I've seen suggestions that another driver for the British industrial revolution was the availability of workers because agriculture had become somewhat more efficient and you no longer needed 90% of the population farming. Hence there was enough surplus labour to be employed in mines and manufactories. It's true that parts of the Roman empire apparently outsourced some of the agriculture to other parts but even around Rome there was still a lot of farming going on and not a lot of spare bodies.
A couple of other possible hindrances. War is an obvious one. Imperial Rome had very few periods where there was more than a decade between internal squabbles between would-be emperors and all of those tended to concentrate on Rome which is the place where an industrial revolution might have started, while there was general peace in England during the 1700s. That means that in England if you had a bright idea it didn't get smashed to bits by some rampaging legion.
Failure to understand economics could be another. Arabic numerals certainly helped but while it seems obvious to us here in the future, it took the proto-bankers in Italy and the Netherlands quite some time to figure out even basic things like capital assets vs income or profits vs losses. And hence loans (at non usurious rates of interest), inflation (or lack of it) and so on. There was IIRC general wage and price stability in England from the Glorious revolution until the war spending of the Napoleonic wars. Such stability, combined with a lack of (internal) warfare makes it easier to implement longer term plans
On agriculture, Tony Wrigley talks about this in Energy and the English Industrial Revolution. A long series of agricultural innovations hit England over the course of about three hundred years which had taken fifteen hundred years in China (or not occurred there). And of course Rome didn't have those innovations either. The compressed timespan, and the different family structure in England, meant that England could stay out of the Malthusian trap for quite a few generations, and had labour and horsepower available where wanted during this time.
Being careful not to miss the next step forward is laudable. But the inverse is also important. Our society really needs to be vigilant about our next opportunity to take massive steps backwards. This is particularly important because even partial collapse of modern industrial civilization will cost billions of lives and is likely unrecoverable because the natural resources that an early industrial culture could exploit in a putative recovery from a collapse.
Eh. Just as most of the world is now much further from extreme poverty and brink of starvation than 100 years ago, I just don't see collapse of any sort in our future. What's much more likely is that we advance technological to a stage where tech (like AI?) kills us all.
Tech like fossil fuels could cause some pretty dire consequences as well. It doesn't have to be the fancy tech that kills us. If extreme weather causes crops to fail on a widespread and several billion people to try to migrate, we could see dramatic systems failures and major conflicts.
Frankly, something as simple as fast transportation may cause havoc by spreading the next pandemic too quickly for us to develop counter-measures. We escaped by luck with COVID. Had it been as prolific as it is and, say, twice as fatal as SARS was (20% or so), we would have seen 100s of millions of fatalities worldwide and possibly a billion. I can't imagine the difficulty in coping with the aftermath of that.
Not to mention tech advancements also mean drought and heat resistant crops will be bred and introduced faster.
Likewise with pandemics, just like the mRNA miracle did a lot to alleviate COVID, tech advancements in pharma will also be faster and curtail future pandemics.
I am optimistic we will meet the challenges, but recent events where stupid levels of promoting denialism are too lucrative for sleazebags to deny are very concerning. These problems are going to take global effort to remedy and we are close to irrevocable switches like the failure of the Atlantic currents.
“They had easy access to all the necessary inputs and clear use cases for each technology. The only thing they lacked was the ideas and a culture which produced them and supported their spread.”
I think that last bit is really onto the main reason. Russian sociologist Kamil Galeev wrote an insightful piece about the relationship of entrepreneurship, innovation and strong-men style leadership, posted here:
Briefly, strongmen leadership aka violent entrepreneurs tend to disincentivize would-be innovators aka nonviolent entrepreneurs because the violent ones can simply steal everything by threatening violence. As such, with effective rule of law, liberal governance is a “hot house” which acts as a non-natural incubator for innovation. Without this, only the violent entrepreneurs innovate and that is not usually their specialty
I think there is a lot to this. We see periods of stable succession followed by civil war. Each time that civil war comes around, the dueling claimants tend to expropriate whatever they need to pay their armies (and also wipe out debts for political favor). Of course, Britain had its own succession crises and wars — but its wars were often fought on the mainland, not on the island of Britain. As far as I recall, there have been none since the Glorious Revolution (1688). Before that, I think they went from the War of the Roses to the beginnings of the Civil War (the Bishops War). That was from 1487 to 1639. There were domestic uprisings and succession crises galore, but nothing like what wracked the Roman Empire. And there were plenty of wars fought off the island of Britain. So maybe a big moat is the prerequisite for an Industrial Revolution.
Yes, I think so. A big moat also keeps a ferocious military power in Eurasia from crushing you. The Dutch had virtually everything pre-modern England had before the Industrial Revolution but while it could keep at bay the relatively far away Spaniards (a strong navy helped), it's still small and big militarily strong France is right next door, ready to intervene and crush the Dutch when/if given the opportunity (and the Brits were a threat from the sea too). Similarly, China (even though it was the powerhouse of its region) was conquered by steppe nomadic "barbarian" peoples multiple times while Japan never was (before WWII).
I think you are mistaken about Devereaux assumption about rome lacking the inputs neccesary for industrialsiaiton.
As pointed out in his post, "potential" demand for coal is irrelevant. What matters if the demand actually existed. Rome seems to primarily use wood (and olive oil) as fuel. Those massive kilns you mentioned were commonly built near forest to have easier acces to fuel. Consider that in the pre railroad days, transporting things was extremely difficult, so mining coal and then hauling it accros the country was not an option when the woods were around the corner.
This applies to the mines as well. The romans certainly had advanced mining machinery, but early coal engines were so inneficient it would no make sense to employ it to power such machinery in the gold and silver mines such machinery was commonly located. This is because it would require constant importing of thousands of tons of coal from elsewhere. Too much fo a hassle when wood was available.
To quote the man himself: "But the incentive here can’t just be any sort of mining, it *has* to be coal mining because of the inefficiency problem: coal (a fuel you can run the engine on) is of course going to be very cheap and abundant directly above the mine where it is being produced and for the atmospheric engine to make sense as an investment the fuel must be very cheap indeed." (emphasis mine)
And for coal mines to exist you need a very large demand (not potential demand, actual demand) for coal, which just did not exist in rome.
The cotton gin made slavery profitable, but the economics of slavery slowed innovation. For example, work on sugar plantations killed and maimed a lot of slaves every year, but even though a much safer sugar production process was developed, it was more expensive than simply buying new slaves, so it was not adopted.
The cotton "sled", for example, was no more sophisticated than a harvester, and the breed of cotton suitable for it had been around for a long time. Despite this, the economics of cotton with first slavery and then sharecropping meant it was not worth adopting. It wasn't until the bumper crop of 1926 that labor shortages led to its widespread adoption.
It isn't always just slavery. It's often just business as usual that provides the inertia. It isn't worth adopting a labor saving technique, if the capital cost would put you at a disadvantage, and early technologies tend to be relatively expensive and offer limited improvement. Look at the slow adoption of office computers and the paperless office. Look at the transformation in restaurants wrought by the COVID labor shortage.
Rome never had the Newcomen Atmospieric Engine that was perfected in about 1720 to efficiently create steam power. That meant that factories, especially steel, were more efficient by moving production to the energy source, which in England was coal.
Historians talk about the Silk Road, but they do not talk about the huge value of the very small quantities of steel produced in China and India. The real Sik Road was Viking raiding for white women, taking them own to Kievan Rus, selling to Muslim traders for silver and gold, and then buy steel that in ancient times was only produced in small in China and India.
A berserker with a steel ax blade always slaughters high numbers of defenders with iron or bronze sword.
If people are afraid that their tricks or knowledge will be stolen without getting any credit, they will try to keep it a trade secret. You need to inspire trust in strangers to respect your rights. Only then will it be possible for the printing press to have its impact.
Why didn't Rome (to my knowledge) invent joint stock companies?
Trying to explain why Rome didn't invent simpler technologies such as the printing press might shed light on why Rome didn't undergo an industrial revolution.
Great read! I once asked a similar question of Mughal Bengal and Song China (links below), and a common feature to both is that there is absolutely nothing coming close to a consensus as to why they didn't industrialize. Rome clearly seems to be in the same situation. If I were to research this some more I think I'd start by examining the extent of Roman proto-industries. Hmm. I might just do that.
On culture, you end up near Deirdre McCloskey's position in her Bourgeois trilogy, which roots industrialization (and the exponential takeoff of economic growth) in shifting cultural attitudes towards commerce in early modern Western Europe.
Yes, definitely an inspiration. I think my perspective is similarly also built from a sort of process of elimination where cultural attitudes emerge as a primary explanation because all of the other ones seem insufficient.
Very interesting! Here's yet another theory for you. The British were at the forefront of another revolution: Banking. Insurance. CREDIT and that was necessary to turn a few inventions, no matter how useful, into a revolution if you can't pay for it. Sure, Rome was rich but it wasn't good at spreading the money (and credit) around.
Maybe they did invent a printing press or a cotton gin or a hundred other things that disappeared without a trace because the inventors were never able to cash in on them.
Interesting stuff. My understanding is that ancient Rome didn't have too much in the way of intellectual property laws, at least by our standards, which could also play a big role here. Combined with suspicion of novelty, disdain for manual work, and slave labor, and you've got a lot of incentives not to invent new things.
I think you have to reframe the question China and Rome were producing complex machines and larges masses of products for centuries, but that isnt exactly what is meant by the industrial revolution.
what we really mean is why they didnt find themselves on a exponential technological track like those living during the industrial revolution did.
and to that I think the answer is that they didnt have the same kind of competitive market process as existed in those later societies. The rush to invest in tech companies is not a totally new phenomenon one could look at the over investment in early rail roads in Britain and see the same thing. The fusion of greed and technological innovation is I think the secret sauce behind the trend of constant improvement.
To muddy the waters somewhat, well before Rome fell, the Chinese had invented:
The Seismoscope (132 AD): The first known seismoscope, the "Houfeng Didong Yi," was invented by Chinese astronomer Zhang Heng. It could detect earthquakes from hundreds of miles away, proving that the Earth does indeed move under your feet.
Suspension Bridge (282 AD): The Chinese built the world's first suspension bridge, the Anji Bridge, which spanned the Jin River in Sichuan province. It was a real "bridge over troubled water," standing strong for over 1,000 years.
Iron Smelting (4th century BC): The Chinese were the first to smelt iron, a process that revolutionized agriculture and warfare. They were also the first to cast iron into tools, making farming and fighting a lot easier.
Crossbow (4th century BC): The Chinese invented the crossbow, a weapon that could shoot arrows with deadly accuracy. It was the "point and shoot" of its time, giving warriors a new way to say "hello" from a distance.
Wheelbarrow (1st century BC): The Chinese invented the wheelbarrow, which made transporting goods a breeze. It was a real "game-changer," allowing people to move heavy loads with minimal effort.
Paper (105 AD): The Chinese invented paper, which replaced bamboo, silk, and other materials as the primary writing surface. It was a "paper revolution," making communication and record-keeping more efficient.
Gunpowder (9th century AD): The Chinese invented gunpowder, which was initially used for fireworks and later for warfare. It was a "blast" from the past, changing the face of conflict forever.
Compass (2nd century BC): The Chinese invented the compass, which used a magnetic needle to point north. It was a "magnetic" invention, helping sailors navigate the seas and explorers find their way.
Porcelain (2nd century BC): The Chinese invented porcelain, a type of ceramic that's fired at high temperatures to create a hard, translucent material. It was a "china" revolution, making tableware and decorative items more durable and beautiful.
Seismometer (132 AD): Zhang Heng also invented the first seismometer, which could detect earthquakes and record their intensity. It was a "groundbreaking" invention, helping people understand and predict seismic activity.
The Anji bridge was built during the Sui dynasty which begun in 581 ad. Also it is still standing from what I can see
You missed the most important one, the mouldboard plow. When this arrived in England it changed ploughing from requiring a team of six or eight horses to needing one or two, while being faster. As a result the land requirement for growing horse fodder plummeted from about half of the total under cultivation to less than a tenth.
That freed up a lot of horses for other uses, powering mills of various kinds. As well as forcing a lot of ex farm labourers into the towns. Reducing the number of horses meant land formerly used to grow their fodder could be used to grow food crops, too.
The seed drill, also invented by the Han, both reduced the seed grain requirement from about two bushels per acre to about half a bushel and dramatically increased yields by preventing plant overcrowding, so net yields of wheat tripled in the best cases.
That further freed up horses and men.
According to Robert Temple in his book, “The Genius of China,” a history of Chinese science and technology published in 1998, the Chinese invented the moldboard plow before the third century B.C.
Made of cast iron, the plowshare was shaped like a V, with the blade carving into the ground and the two arms arching away like gull wings. Because the arms were curved, they turned the earth away from the blade, which both reduced friction and more effectively plowed the soil. The “moldboard” is the curved plowshare; the name comes from “mold,” the Old German word for “soil”.
I think you are wrong on iron — that would be the Hittite’s around 1300 bc
Those Hittites again!
I think an unaddressed point (related to your points regarding the lack of printing press) is the underlying genetic human capital of the people of the Roman Empire. As Garrett Jones demonstrated in his book *Hive Mind*, small changes in a population's average IQ has big effects.
A recent paper looks into this--discussed here: https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2024/03/what-do-ancient-genomes-show-about-recent-human-evolution/. The abstract states in part, "The study supports a mild hypothesis of Gregory Clark’s model, showing a noticeable rise in genetic propensities for intelligence, academic achievement and professional status across Europe from the Middle Ages to the present." Given the selection for intelligence, etc., since the time of the Roman Empire, maybe the Roman Empire simply had too low of an average IQ to kickstart the industrial revolution.
This seems fairly plausible to me.
The Romans had much worse overall technology than 18th century England, and the rate of innovation was much, much lower, and the rate per capita was much, much, much lower.
I've seen suggestions that another driver for the British industrial revolution was the availability of workers because agriculture had become somewhat more efficient and you no longer needed 90% of the population farming. Hence there was enough surplus labour to be employed in mines and manufactories. It's true that parts of the Roman empire apparently outsourced some of the agriculture to other parts but even around Rome there was still a lot of farming going on and not a lot of spare bodies.
A couple of other possible hindrances. War is an obvious one. Imperial Rome had very few periods where there was more than a decade between internal squabbles between would-be emperors and all of those tended to concentrate on Rome which is the place where an industrial revolution might have started, while there was general peace in England during the 1700s. That means that in England if you had a bright idea it didn't get smashed to bits by some rampaging legion.
Failure to understand economics could be another. Arabic numerals certainly helped but while it seems obvious to us here in the future, it took the proto-bankers in Italy and the Netherlands quite some time to figure out even basic things like capital assets vs income or profits vs losses. And hence loans (at non usurious rates of interest), inflation (or lack of it) and so on. There was IIRC general wage and price stability in England from the Glorious revolution until the war spending of the Napoleonic wars. Such stability, combined with a lack of (internal) warfare makes it easier to implement longer term plans
On agriculture, Tony Wrigley talks about this in Energy and the English Industrial Revolution. A long series of agricultural innovations hit England over the course of about three hundred years which had taken fifteen hundred years in China (or not occurred there). And of course Rome didn't have those innovations either. The compressed timespan, and the different family structure in England, meant that England could stay out of the Malthusian trap for quite a few generations, and had labour and horsepower available where wanted during this time.
Being careful not to miss the next step forward is laudable. But the inverse is also important. Our society really needs to be vigilant about our next opportunity to take massive steps backwards. This is particularly important because even partial collapse of modern industrial civilization will cost billions of lives and is likely unrecoverable because the natural resources that an early industrial culture could exploit in a putative recovery from a collapse.
Eh. Just as most of the world is now much further from extreme poverty and brink of starvation than 100 years ago, I just don't see collapse of any sort in our future. What's much more likely is that we advance technological to a stage where tech (like AI?) kills us all.
Tech like fossil fuels could cause some pretty dire consequences as well. It doesn't have to be the fancy tech that kills us. If extreme weather causes crops to fail on a widespread and several billion people to try to migrate, we could see dramatic systems failures and major conflicts.
Frankly, something as simple as fast transportation may cause havoc by spreading the next pandemic too quickly for us to develop counter-measures. We escaped by luck with COVID. Had it been as prolific as it is and, say, twice as fatal as SARS was (20% or so), we would have seen 100s of millions of fatalities worldwide and possibly a billion. I can't imagine the difficulty in coping with the aftermath of that.
I'm anti-fossil fuels but global warming is a solvable problem so we won't actually ever get to that stage: https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/so2-injection
Not to mention tech advancements also mean drought and heat resistant crops will be bred and introduced faster.
Likewise with pandemics, just like the mRNA miracle did a lot to alleviate COVID, tech advancements in pharma will also be faster and curtail future pandemics.
AI (and humans) are still the biggest threat.
I am optimistic we will meet the challenges, but recent events where stupid levels of promoting denialism are too lucrative for sleazebags to deny are very concerning. These problems are going to take global effort to remedy and we are close to irrevocable switches like the failure of the Atlantic currents.
Fascinating piece, thank you
“They had easy access to all the necessary inputs and clear use cases for each technology. The only thing they lacked was the ideas and a culture which produced them and supported their spread.”
I think that last bit is really onto the main reason. Russian sociologist Kamil Galeev wrote an insightful piece about the relationship of entrepreneurship, innovation and strong-men style leadership, posted here:
https://kamilkazani.substack.com/p/elon-musk
Briefly, strongmen leadership aka violent entrepreneurs tend to disincentivize would-be innovators aka nonviolent entrepreneurs because the violent ones can simply steal everything by threatening violence. As such, with effective rule of law, liberal governance is a “hot house” which acts as a non-natural incubator for innovation. Without this, only the violent entrepreneurs innovate and that is not usually their specialty
I think there is a lot to this. We see periods of stable succession followed by civil war. Each time that civil war comes around, the dueling claimants tend to expropriate whatever they need to pay their armies (and also wipe out debts for political favor). Of course, Britain had its own succession crises and wars — but its wars were often fought on the mainland, not on the island of Britain. As far as I recall, there have been none since the Glorious Revolution (1688). Before that, I think they went from the War of the Roses to the beginnings of the Civil War (the Bishops War). That was from 1487 to 1639. There were domestic uprisings and succession crises galore, but nothing like what wracked the Roman Empire. And there were plenty of wars fought off the island of Britain. So maybe a big moat is the prerequisite for an Industrial Revolution.
Yes, I think so. A big moat also keeps a ferocious military power in Eurasia from crushing you. The Dutch had virtually everything pre-modern England had before the Industrial Revolution but while it could keep at bay the relatively far away Spaniards (a strong navy helped), it's still small and big militarily strong France is right next door, ready to intervene and crush the Dutch when/if given the opportunity (and the Brits were a threat from the sea too). Similarly, China (even though it was the powerhouse of its region) was conquered by steppe nomadic "barbarian" peoples multiple times while Japan never was (before WWII).
I think you are mistaken about Devereaux assumption about rome lacking the inputs neccesary for industrialsiaiton.
As pointed out in his post, "potential" demand for coal is irrelevant. What matters if the demand actually existed. Rome seems to primarily use wood (and olive oil) as fuel. Those massive kilns you mentioned were commonly built near forest to have easier acces to fuel. Consider that in the pre railroad days, transporting things was extremely difficult, so mining coal and then hauling it accros the country was not an option when the woods were around the corner.
This applies to the mines as well. The romans certainly had advanced mining machinery, but early coal engines were so inneficient it would no make sense to employ it to power such machinery in the gold and silver mines such machinery was commonly located. This is because it would require constant importing of thousands of tons of coal from elsewhere. Too much fo a hassle when wood was available.
To quote the man himself: "But the incentive here can’t just be any sort of mining, it *has* to be coal mining because of the inefficiency problem: coal (a fuel you can run the engine on) is of course going to be very cheap and abundant directly above the mine where it is being produced and for the atmospheric engine to make sense as an investment the fuel must be very cheap indeed." (emphasis mine)
And for coal mines to exist you need a very large demand (not potential demand, actual demand) for coal, which just did not exist in rome.
The cotton gin made slavery profitable, but the economics of slavery slowed innovation. For example, work on sugar plantations killed and maimed a lot of slaves every year, but even though a much safer sugar production process was developed, it was more expensive than simply buying new slaves, so it was not adopted.
The cotton "sled", for example, was no more sophisticated than a harvester, and the breed of cotton suitable for it had been around for a long time. Despite this, the economics of cotton with first slavery and then sharecropping meant it was not worth adopting. It wasn't until the bumper crop of 1926 that labor shortages led to its widespread adoption.
It isn't always just slavery. It's often just business as usual that provides the inertia. It isn't worth adopting a labor saving technique, if the capital cost would put you at a disadvantage, and early technologies tend to be relatively expensive and offer limited improvement. Look at the slow adoption of office computers and the paperless office. Look at the transformation in restaurants wrought by the COVID labor shortage.
Rome never had the Newcomen Atmospieric Engine that was perfected in about 1720 to efficiently create steam power. That meant that factories, especially steel, were more efficient by moving production to the energy source, which in England was coal.
Historians talk about the Silk Road, but they do not talk about the huge value of the very small quantities of steel produced in China and India. The real Sik Road was Viking raiding for white women, taking them own to Kievan Rus, selling to Muslim traders for silver and gold, and then buy steel that in ancient times was only produced in small in China and India.
A berserker with a steel ax blade always slaughters high numbers of defenders with iron or bronze sword.
If people are afraid that their tricks or knowledge will be stolen without getting any credit, they will try to keep it a trade secret. You need to inspire trust in strangers to respect your rights. Only then will it be possible for the printing press to have its impact.
Europe developed accounting systems and banking practices which kept interest rates low.
Why didn't Rome (to my knowledge) invent joint stock companies?
Trying to explain why Rome didn't invent simpler technologies such as the printing press might shed light on why Rome didn't undergo an industrial revolution.
Great read! I once asked a similar question of Mughal Bengal and Song China (links below), and a common feature to both is that there is absolutely nothing coming close to a consensus as to why they didn't industrialize. Rome clearly seems to be in the same situation. If I were to research this some more I think I'd start by examining the extent of Roman proto-industries. Hmm. I might just do that.
https://etiennefd.substack.com/p/the-industrial-revolution-that-almost
https://etiennefd.substack.com/p/a-song-of-proto-industrialization